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The Association for Computing Machinery, the primary professional organization in the field of computer science, has named two University of Texas at Austin professors — Peter Stone and Lizy Kurian John — as ACM Fellows. The award goes only to highly distinguished computer scientists representing the top 1% of ACM members.

University of Texas at Austin researchers have been instrumental in tracking the spread of the coronavirus, developing critical antibody treatments to save lives, developing diagnostics and creating the vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 that are currently being distributed around the world.

The College of Natural Sciences welcomed more than 20 leading researchers and captivating teachers as new tenured and tenure-track members of the faculty this academic year. Meet some of the newest scientists, mathematicians and technologists on our faculty.

At the age of four Amir Husain fell in love with computers — in his words, he "became obsessed" with them. In his teens he began writing to his heroes, computer scientists like Niklaus Wirth, who created the Pascal programming language, and Nicholas Negroponte, a pioneer in the study of how humans interact with computers. They all wrote back. Amir left his home of Lahore, Pakistan to attend The University of Texas at Austin 8,000 miles away, drawn by the work of one of UT's computer science labs. While at UT, he found a kindred spirit in his wife Zaib, who was also from Lahore and a student at the McCombs School of Business.

The Teaching Excellence Award in the College of Natural Sciences seeks to promote and recognize excellent teaching in the College of Natural Sciences by honoring faculty members who have had a positive influence on the educational experience of our students. Read on to meet this year's winners.

Industry analysts say that more data has been collected in the past two years than in all of human history combined. Data about what we buy, what we watch, where we go and who our friends are is constantly being collected and stored. Analyzing all that data and gaining insights from it is the hard part.

A methodical voice tells the watching crowd, "I am going to remove the lid." Everyone is quiet as a robot using artificial intelligence (AI) opens a trash can and lifts out a bag. Students and researchers hold their breath as it navigates across the floor of a mock house, avoiding obstacles to its destination. "Mission accomplished," it says. The trash has been taken out and the audience applauds. This is a huge achievement for the robot designed by a Texas Robotics team for the 2019 RoboCup competition.

We live in an increasingly digital era. Research shows that the average American checks their phone about 58 times daily, and spends an average of 4.5 hours a day on their phone. Without a doubt the amount of time the modern-day person spends on their phones has changed many aspects of how our society functions. For example, in the past decade we have seen a dramatic shift in forms of advertising. Companies are able to take note of people's patterns online and create personalized ads through the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

Evolutionary biologists never have enough time. Some of the most mysterious behaviors in the animal kingdom—like parenting—evolved over thousands of years, if not longer. Human lifespans are just too short to sit and observe such complex behaviors evolve. But computer scientists are beginning to offer clues by using artificial intelligence to simulate the life and death of thousands of generations of animals in a matter of hours or days. It's called computational evolution.

Many of the decisions we make are now guided by computational simulations, from designing new spacecraft to predicting the spread of a pandemic. But it's not enough for a simulation model to just issue predictions. A decision-maker needs to know just how much those predictions can be trusted.